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Monthly Archives: August 2017

Use social media productively â BloggerGraphic OnlineA blogger, Mr Felix Adomako, has urged the youth to use social media productively rather than for unproductive ventures. According to him, applying social media to create wealth or make money was one way unemployment in the country could be reduced, …

The shock auteur is back in US cinemas with his second and arguably most extreme film. He shares his thoughts on Trump, Spring Breakers and fake vomit

Hi, John! Where are you?

Im in Provincetown. This is my 52nd summer Ive been here. (1)

Youre about to rerelease a restored version of your second film, Multiple Maniacs, into cinemas to shock a whole new generation. It stars Divine as the crazed impresario of a depraved freak show. How do you feel it plays now 46 years after it originally opened? (2)

Maybe it works better now than it did then. I dont know! Well see. Ive seen it with one audience and it seemed to play pretty well. People seemed startled by it, and it was an audience that had seen everything.

This was my trainer wheels for Pink Flamingos(3). This was when I finally got my voice even though it was too loud and too long. Its making fun of hippie rules of the era, the same way that I make fun of political or gayly correct rules today. I think its exactly like what all my work has been like from the very beginning, really.

How did hippies react to your gonzo vision back in the day?

They liked it! Who came were bikers though. And crazy gay people. And speed freaks. People on LSD. They were all radical within their own community and they responded to it very well.

This was in the peak of peace and love, but it was also at the peak when everything fell apart like crazy. There was such a war going on then between the hippies and the straight world; and straight didnt mean heterosexual it meant you didnt smoke pot or you didnt think the revolution was going to happen.

I read the original negative of the film was kept in your closet before being moved to your attic. Had you even wanted to rerelease it and have it restored?

Ive been trying to get this released for a long time. Basically when the Lincoln Center had a big retrospective of my work and they showed the last 60mm print, the people from Criterion were there and they called (4). I had no idea what they could do with restorations what they could make it look like.

They asked if I wanted to keep it exactly as is, with every mistake in there. I said, Are you kidding me? I never purposely had mistakes in there! I dont want the splice marks to show, I dont want the dirt in the lens! Make it look good! Now it looks like a bad John Cassavetes movie.

What do you make of Multiple Maniacs returning during the Trump-era?

Lets hope that its not the era of Trump. That would mean he wins.

OK an era during which a reality star can get this far in the race to become president.

Oh, I lived through Nixon. I lived through Reagan. They were all horrible. [Laughs] Would Trump be offended by Multiple Maniacs? Probably not.

(4) The Criterion Collection, the celebrated home video distribution company that licenses and sells classic films, supervised the restoration of Multiple Maniacs. New Yorks Film Society of Lincoln Center, hosted a Waters retrospective in 2014, titled Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?

(5) Waters voted Spring Breakers, Harmony Korines neon-hued, girls-gone-wild caper, his favorite film of 2013. Waters once said of Korine: Hes the only director that ever made me leer after naked female Disney stars.

(6)Hairspray, the stage musical based on Waters 1988 film, won eight Tony awards in 2003, including one for best musical. Its since been adapted into a second film, starring John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer, released in 2007.

(7) A Dirty Shame (2004), Waters most recent directorial effort, stars British comic Tracey Ullman as a repressed housewife, who after getting smacked in the head by a passing car, becomes a ravenous sex addict.

(8) Divine (real name: Harris Glenn Milstead) died in his sleep in 1988 of an enlarged heart aged 42.

Multiple Manics opens in New York on 5 August at the IFC Center before opening in select cinemas nationwide.

For those of you following Instagrams ad business, myheadline might seem a bit familiar yes, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service announced another advertiser milestone back in February, but at the time there were only 200,000 advertisers, less than half of the 500,000 advertisers that Instagram says it has today.

This time around, the big message is that Instagram campaigns arent just about reaching eyeballs, but also convincing users to buy products. For one thing, the company says that since the global launch of the ad program last September, Instagram ads have driven one billion user actions. It also says those ads drive a 2 percent lift in offline sales.

As an example, Instagram points to handbag brand Dagne Dover, whose Instagram campaign combined a Shop Now button with targeting at students, mothers, professionals and women interested in fashion and travel, ultimately increasing return on ad spend 13x in two months.

One of the most important things to us is that small businesses dont judge their success based on followers or likes, but that they focus on real world actions, said James Quarles, Instagrams vice president and general manager of monetization.

Quarles told me that Instagram will be giving businesses more data in this vein. In addition, it will be rolling out different ways to tell stories (so, more ad formats) and doing more to understand the customer journey (which could help advertisers show you the right ad at the right time, rather than trying to sell you a product before youre interested).

As for whether or not users can expect to seemore ads in their Instagram feed, Quarles said that thecompany is monitoring engagement closely, and that theres no set ratio of ads to non-ads. The key, he said is to make sure that ads are relevant to you theyre as well-crafted, theyre as high quality as all the content in peoples feeds.

Live Blogging the Travers Stakes day Past Performances ReleaseBrisnet.comIf you're like me, then you were hitting F5 on the Saratoga handicapping reports page once the overnight for the Travers Stakes day card was available. It's always one of the more exciting cards of the year, but this one really delivers with 13 races …

OK, so it’s no secret that wheneverall of our favorite superheroes gettogether in one movie we’re going to geek out a little bit. I mean,really, who isn’t excited to see Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Batman, The Flash, and Superman in later this year? Exactly, I thought so.

It’s exactly that kind of over-the-top excitement that brings comic book fans out for movies like and . Naturally, though, anytime a movie like one of these two comes out, the first thing everyone assumes is there will be follow-up standalone movies for each major superhero.

I want to just make one thing perfectly clear today: A standalonemovie will never happen.Universal has the rights, and for some reason, they don’t know how to play well with Marvel. And they don’t want to make money.

As disappointing as that is, and as much as it makes me want to Hulk smash stuff, at least we can take solace in knowing thatMarvel is doing its best to bring us a Bruce Bannerarcthroughout a few different movies. I guess we’ll just have to be patient with this one.

“We’re closer to the margin than we think,” lead author Adrian Raftery, a statistics professor at the University of Washington, told the Guardian this week. “If we want to avoid 2 degrees Celsius, we have very little time left. The public should be very concerned.”

Two degrees Celsius is the global temperature rise that the signatories of the Paris climate agreement have committed to staying under. They also set a loftier goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius ― but according to the new paper, there’s only a 1 percent chance of that happening.

Instead, the “likely range” of global temperature increase by 2100 is 2 to 4.9 degrees Celsius, the researchers concluded ― with a median rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius.

Despite the depressing findings, however, experts warned that giving up is not an option. Emissions could still significantly decline if there was, for instance, a substantial rise in renewable energy use or other “breakthrough technologies” ― factors that were not considered in the scientists’ calculations.

The study authors said they hope their research will remind people of the urgency to take action ― and to act immediately. “Even if the[ 2 degrees Celsius] target isn’t met, action is very important,” Raftery told the Guardian. “The more the temperature increases, the worse the impacts will be.”

The scientists said they did not adjust their calculations based on U.S. policy changes under Trump, but noted that his decision on the Paris pact would “certainly be a negative one.”

“I would remind the Trump administration something about real estate … It’s really hard to make money on real estate that’s under the ocean,” study coauthor and economist Dick Startz told Wired this week. “That’s where a lot of American real estate is going to be (notably in Florida) if we don’t change course.”